The Medical Library at Yale
The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library and the Growth of Electronic Resources, 1990-2001
The Information Room, 1999
The Information Room, 1990
In 1990, the new sky-lit Information Room had a large collection of reference books, Author/Title and Subject card catalogs, and no workstations. As the 1990s progressed, library patrons had electronic access to over 2,500 biomedical journals, textbooks, hundreds of databases and databanks, medical education software, and a host of other reference resources. Librarians played an increasing role in teaching and education to enable patrons to make the maximum use of these resources. Productivity workstations were added to the Information Room in 1999.
Medline on CD-ROM (MEDEXPRESS), 1991
MEDEXPRESS, located on just one computer in the Information Room, represented a significant improvement over miniMEDLINE because it provided public electronic access to all of the bibliographical records in MEDLINE going back to 1966. MiniMEDLINE, also confined to only a few terminals in the Information Room, gave access to bibliographical records of only the core journals and more recent literature.
Netmenu
Netmenu, launched in 1992, was the Medical Library's first interface for its workstations.
Web Homepage, 1996
Shown here in this issue of Connections is an early version of the Library's home page on the Web. The original Web site (http://info.med.yale.edu/library/) was launched in 1994 and redesigned in 1996. It has gone through several more redesigns since. Connections was published jointly by ITS-Med and the Medical Library. The Library's current website is https://library.medicine.yale.edu/.
Retrospective Conversion, 1998-2000
Yale's first electronic library catalog was introduced in 1989. As of July 1989, the card catalog was closed and all newly arrived items were cataloged online. However many earlier cataloged items could be found only through the card catalogue. Researchers not at Yale depended on “union lists” such as those published by the Library of Congress, to find out what items existed and who held them. In this photograph, Chris Melnyk, former Cataloging Assistant, is packing the cards of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library’s author/title card catalog to be sent to OCLC for “retrospective conversion.” As of 2000, all holdings, current and historical, were represented on Orbis, Yale’s online library catalog.
The Epidemiology and Public Health Library
The former Epidemiology and Public Health (EPH) Library, located across College Street from the main EPH building, was part of the Medical Library and of the University Library, though funded separately. It closed in 2013, and books and other materials were transferred to the Medical Library.
The Yale School of Nursing Library
The School of Nursing Library was integrated into the Medical Library and the University Library in the summer of 2000 when the nursing journals and books were transferred to the Medical Library and for the first time, cataloged on ORBIS. The Library in the School of Nursing, located on West Campus, now consists of reference books, course reserves, and workstations.